The semi-random thoughts and musings of my daily life... written, literally, from the laptop on my kitchen table.

Saturday, September 19, 2009

Domestic Goddess

Today I was a total domestic goddess. And I've got the tomato splotched t-shirt to prove it!

I've had a cold pack canner for about 10 years and today I finally used it as a canner for the very first time. It's been used before to cook corn at a backyard barbeque and to cook a load of spaghetti for a Church party, but today was its maiden voyage into canning. I made salsa. Red and green... and they are so good! I'm chalking this one up as a success.

And I've got my freezer filled out of the garden. It's packed with ziplock bags containing chopped tomatoes, diced zucchini and onions, shredded zucchini, 4-cheese mashed potatoes, and crumbled cooked hamburger. Found burger on a good sale. Add this to the few other essentials in there and the strawberry and raspberry jam I made this past Spring (and the peach and apricot still left from last year)... and I've only got the side-by-side in the kitchen. By this time next year I hope to have an extra freezer in the basement just for this kind of stuff, but not right now.

Also tried a new recipe for chocolate chip zucchini bread today. Pretty tasty - hence the shredded zucchini in the freezer.

I think I'm about done with the garden for this year. Our growing season still goes for about another month, but I've got what I wanted from it. Except for corn which I planted but it never set ears. Corn was such an abysmal failure that I don't think I'll ever waste the time and space on planting it again! But I digress... I'm tired of garden. I netted hundreds of tomatoes, more zucchini than I could even keep given away, 130 cucumbers (I only planted 2 hills!) and an easy 30 pounds of green beans. Some days I feel like I'm turning pink from eating so many tomatoes and others it's a lovely shade of chartreuse from all the green stuff. I watered tonight, but there's a very good chance it's the last time. I may ask a few people if they want to keep it picked for a few weeks but if not, then I'm going to start pulling it and getting stuff cleaned up for winter.